Families & the Community

The Artistry of Getting Parents More Involved

By Marianne D. Hurst — February 27, 2002 5 min read
  • Save to favorites
  • Print

From the corner of 84th Drive in the Briarwood section of New York City, Karen Phillips can see the school garden. It makes her smile. But the garden is more than just a beautiful combination of trees, shrubs, and flowers—it also contains a 20-foot mural designed from historic photographs of the neighborhood.

As part of a parent-involvement program last year at the 1,350-student Public School 117 in the borough of Queens, 10 parents cleaned up a garbage-strewn section of the playground and planted the area while their children learned about square footage, plant species, and neighborhood history. After several trips to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan, where students and parents attended a series of workshops, the garden was slowly transformed to include the mural.

Ms. Phillips, who is the coordinator of PS 117’s Family Learning Project, says the garden will play a continuing role in this year’s program, named “Garden is Art.” Students and parents will visit the Brooklyn Museum’s mosaic collection, the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens, and the Chinese scholars’ garden in the Metropolitan Museum. They plan to turn a shady portion of their 2,000-square-foot plot into a rock garden.

The garden project has been paid for with a “Parents as Art Partners” grant given by the Center for Arts Education, a New York City-based nonprofit organization. The group was created as part of a five-year arts initiative with the Annenberg Challenge to jump-start arts education.

The center awards $3,000 grants to New York City public schools that seek to involve more parents in their children’s education. This school year the center has given nearly 100 grants to schools like PS 117 to pay for activities that will create stronger parent-school ties through arts education.

The original Annenberg Challenge fund that supported the center expired last year, but the program was such a success that Annenberg officials have decided to provide an additional five-year, $12 million grant.

That money will be supplemented by the New York state board of education, which has agreed to kick in another $2 million. Center officials say they plan to give out another 500 grants over the next five years and hope eventually to expand its program to all 1,100 public schools in New York City.

‘Common Language’

PS 144, another school in Queens, plans to use its grant money to launch a program it calls “Rediscovering America.” The initiative will focus on the American experience by studying a variety of artists throughout history, as well as the New York City landmarks that stood during their lifetimes.

Parents and students will be able to write personal genealogies and apply their own experiences as Americans to the project, while learning to navigate the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan.

Parental involvement is crucial to learning, said Lauri Tisck Sussman, the chairwoman of the Center for Arts Education’s board. “In all schools, but especially New York City, so many cultures are represented. The more that parents can get involved, the more children can learn.”

Lois Olsham, the arts coordinator at the 750-student PS 144, said the arts can help forge those bonds. “Art is a way to have a common language in a multicultural society, a way for children to make sense of things they don’t understand by applying academic concepts to the real world.”

Mimi C. Flaherty, the senior director of education with the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts in Vienna, Va., said schools must make themselves more comfortable settings in order to attract parents and get them more involved.

“We have so many cultural refugees in our population now that parents are often reluctant to come into schools because the school itself is seen as a part of the bureaucracy they’re running from,” Ms. Flaherty said.

Programs also need to rope parents in early, she said, as well as give them meaningful experiences. Timing can also play a role. Working parents face scheduling constraints, meaning many cultural programs offered by schools must be held on evenings or weekends.

Developing high-quality arts programs has been challenging. Hamstrung since the budget crises that arose around the nation in the 1970s, arts education programs have often been viewed as nickel- and-dime events that have little or no bearing on a child’s academic development. School districts faced with shrinking funding see them as one of the easiest and safest ways to trim their budgets.

“It’s a huge challenge for regular school programs,” said Ms. Flaherty, who added that while some schools do face fixed budgets, a greater obstacle is simply getting people to understand the value of arts education. “If you get parents involved in a meaningful way, you’re connecting the home to the school and the school to the community.”

Arts for All

Another problem is the lack of a clear national picture of how much schools budget, spend, and cut when it comes to the arts, said Richard J. Deasy, the director of the Arts Education Partnership, a Washington-based private, nonprofit coalition of education, arts, business, philanthropic, and government organizations.

“People today don’t see the arts as offering the kinds of skills young people need to excel in our economy,” Mr. Deasy said. “But they’re wrong.”

In fact, he notes, many of the skills fostered by the arts are used in a variety of high-paying fields, such as graphic design, an industry in which artists work on Web sites, medical imaging, and entertainment industry projects, as well as fields such as architecture and fashion design.

In addition, many educators find that parents are unaware that the arts can be learned by all children with beneficial results—not just by the gifted or exceptionally talented.

“The arts are a cognitive skill,” said PS 144 parent and museum educator JoAnne Wasti, who works at the Guggenheim Museum. “They engage children so a teacher isn’t just talking, but taking students beyond the text. This lays down a foundation for learning higher concepts.”

Related Tags:

A version of this article appeared in the February 27, 2002 edition of Education Week as The Artistry of Getting Parents More Involved

Events

Ed-Tech Policy Webinar Artificial Intelligence in Practice: Building a Roadmap for AI Use in Schools
AI in education: game-changer or classroom chaos? Join our webinar & learn how to navigate this evolving tech responsibly.
Education Webinar Developing and Executing Impactful Research Campaigns to Fuel Your Ed Marketing Strategy 
Develop impactful research campaigns to fuel your marketing. Join the EdWeek Research Center for a webinar with actionable take-aways for companies who sell to K-12 districts.
This content is provided by our sponsor. It is not written by and does not necessarily reflect the views of Education Week's editorial staff.
Sponsor
Privacy & Security Webinar
Navigating Cybersecurity: Securing District Documents and Data
Learn how K-12 districts are addressing the challenges of maintaining a secure tech environment, managing documents and data, automating critical processes, and doing it all with limited resources.
Content provided by Softdocs

EdWeek Top School Jobs

Teacher Jobs
Search over ten thousand teaching jobs nationwide — elementary, middle, high school and more.
View Jobs
Principal Jobs
Find hundreds of jobs for principals, assistant principals, and other school leadership roles.
View Jobs
Administrator Jobs
Over a thousand district-level jobs: superintendents, directors, more.
View Jobs
Support Staff Jobs
Search thousands of jobs, from paraprofessionals to counselors and more.
View Jobs

Read Next

Families & the Community Opinion Why Educators Often Have It Wrong About Right-Leaning Parents
Stereotypes and misunderstandings keep educators from engaging constructively with conservative parents, write Rick Hess and Michael McShane.
Rick Hess & Michael McShane
5 min read
Two women look at each other from across a large chasm.
Mary Long/iStock + Education Week
Families & the Community Opinion Chronic Absenteeism Has Exploded. What Can Schools Do?
The key to addressing this issue is rebuilding the relationship between families and schools.
8 min read
Image shows a multi-tailed arrow hitting the bullseye of a target.
DigitalVision Vectors/Getty
Families & the Community Leader To Learn From Absenteeism Was a Big Problem in This District. A New Strategy Is Getting Results
Sharon Bradley remembers how it felt to miss school for reasons outside her control.
11 min read
Sharon Bradley, director of student, family and community services for Plano ISD, listens to members of the Character, Attendance, and Restorative Education (CARE) team discuss their current projects in Plano, Texas, on Dec. 14, 2023. The CARE department focuses on equipping students and adults with the tools, strategies, and resources that support a safe, engaging, and collaborative learning environment through character education, attendance recovery, and restorative practices.
Sharon Bradley, the director of student, family, and community services for the Plano, Texas, school district listens to staff members on a special team that focuses on helping students and their families address a range of challenges that may get in the way of regular attendance and engagement at school.
Shelby Tauber for Education Week
Families & the Community Leader To Learn From A Former Teacher Turns Classroom Prowess Into Partnerships With Families
Ana Pasarella maximizes her community's assets to put students first.
8 min read
Ana Pasarella, the director of family and community engagement for Alvin ISD, oversees an activity as Micaela Leon, 3, a student in Alvin ISD’s READy Program, draws on a piece of paper on Alvin ISD’s STEM bus in Manvel, Texas, on Dec. 8, 2023.
Ana Pasarella, the director of family and community engagement for the Alvin Independent school district in Texas, oversees an activity as Micaela Leon, 3, a student in the district's READy Program, draws on a piece of paper inside the district's STEM bus in Manvel, Texas.
Callaghan O’Hare for Education Week